Free Republic

People hate America's big disparities in wealth. It's a reason why, among young people, socialism is as popular as capitalism. The Democratic Socialists of America want a country based on "freedom, equality and solidarity." That sure sounds good. But does socialism bring that? My new video debunks several myths about socialism. One reason for socialism's continued appeal is linguist Noam Chomsky. For generations, his work has taught students that capitalism is "a grotesque catastrophe." I assumed the fall of the Soviet Union would put an end to such misinformation. It did -- for about a month. But since then, the...

The coronavirus infection spreading across the United States prison system is throwing Ross Ulbricht’s confinement into sharp relief. Found guilty of seven charges including money laundering, conspiracy to traffic narcotics and computer hacking, the controversial founder of the Silk Road is currently serving a double life sentence plus 40 years, without the possibility of parole. As the pandemic worsens conditions for the nation’s large prison population, Ross spends 22 hours a day behind bars in Tucson, Ariz., where he’s currently being held. Outside visits are stopped so Ross’s mother, Lyn, and other loved ones, who work tirelessly for his release,...

Signatures include J.K. Rowling, Bari Weiss, Noam Chomsky and Gloria Steinem Liberal writers, professors and activists have come together and signed an open letter in the hopes of ending "cancel culture." "Harry Potter" author J.K. Rowling, New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss and political activist Noam Chomsky are a few of more than 100 names attached to the piece titled "A Letter on Justice and Open Debate" that was published Tuesday in Harper's Magazine. "Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial," the letter begins. "Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for...

Appearing Sunday on The Michael Brooks Show, leftist professor Noam Chomsky claimed President Donald Trump is “undeniably” the “worst criminal in human history.” A transcript is as follows: MICHAEL BROOKS: Could you explain why what Donald Trump is doing institutionally actually is unique and does matter on its own terms? NOAM CHOMSKY: This sounds strong, but it’s true: Trump is the worst criminal in human history, undeniably. There has never been a figure in political history who was so passionately dedicated to destroying the projects for organized human life on earth in the near future.

According to The New York Times (8 July 2003): "the federal commission investigating the Sept. 11 terror attacks said today that its work was being hampered by the failure of executive branch agencies, especially the Pentagon and the Justice Department, to respond quickly to requests for documents and testimony." Several alternative media have joined the bandwagon. George W. Bush is accused of obstructing the investigation...Former Jersey governor Thomas Kean, the commission's chairman is presented as an honest and uncompromising individual, who is courageously confronting the US government: "Without greater cooperation, Kean said, ''we cannot do the job we are supposed...

While studying acquisition of imagination in children, Dr. Vyshedskiy and his colleagues discovered a temporal limit for the development of a particular component of imagination. It became apparent that modern children who have not been exposed to full language in early childhood never acquire the type of active constructive imagination essential for juxtaposition of mental objects, known as Prefrontal Synthesis (PFS). " Flexible object combination and nesting (otherwise known as recursion) are characteristic features of all human languages. For this reason, linguists refer to modern languages as recursive languages." Unlike vocabulary and grammar acquisition, which can be learned throughout one's...

Noam Chomsky, the noted progressive scholar, believes Democrats have focused far too much on Russia. And he thinks it might earn them four more years of President Donald Trump. Speaking at a forum in Boston with Amy Goodman, Chomsky stated his view that he always believed there was going to be little to no proof of collusion in the Mueller Report. “[T]he Democrats are helping him,” Chomsky said. “They are. Take the focus on Russia-gate. What’s that all about? I mean, it was pretty obvious at the beginning that you’re not going to find anything very serious about Russian interference...

Diet-induced changes in the human bite resulted in new sounds such as "f" in languages all over the world, a study by an international team led by researchers at the University of Zurich has shown. The findings contradict the theory that the range of human sounds has remained fixed throughout human history. Human speech is incredibly diverse, ranging from ubiquitous sounds like "m" and "a" to the rare click consonants in some languages of Southern Africa. This range of sounds is generally thought to have been established with the emergence of the Homo sapiens around 300,000 years ago. A study...

In the age of A.O.C., the lesson must be learned again. Conspicuous by its absence in much of the mainstream news coverage of Venezuela’s political crisis is the word “socialism.” Yes, every sensible observer agrees that Latin America’s once-richest country, sitting atop the world’s largest proven oil reserves, is an economic basket case, a humanitarian disaster, and a dictatorship whose demise cannot come soon enough. But … socialist? Perish the thought. ... the Venezuelan regime’s admirers used to speak of “21st century socialism,” as it was dubbed by Hugo Chávez. The late Venezuelan president, said Britain’s Jeremy Corbyn, “showed us...

Born on December 7, 1928, Noam Chomsky was raised by Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants in Philadelphia. Though his father was a Hebrew scholar who studied medieval grammar, Chomsky lacked direction through school and university and only committed to the study of linguistics when he took up a post at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1955. It wasn't long, however, before the young unknown scholar single-handedly revolutionized the field of linguists, his book Syntactic Structures (1957) kickstarting his concept of "transformational grammar" that argued — contrary to the behaviourist fad of the time — that our linguistic capacity is genetic...

Left-wing academic Noam Chomsky says President Trump is not a “nationalist" because Trump doesn't care enough about his own nation, regardless of Trump's controversial embrace of the term this week. Chomsky told the Washington Examiner the term is used in "all sorts of ways." But while the term has been used to describe world leaders such as Adolf Hitler, the linguist and social analyst said he's less concerned about that connotation and more irked by the falsity of Trump's claim. “I do object to the term for different reasons," he said. "A nationalist is someone who is concerned for the...

A growing body of evidence shows that language doesn’t just give people a set of words to express their thoughts. It actually can have a heavy influence on those thoughts and on the behaviors they lead to. What would this mean for the thinking and behavior of a person who learns a “pure language”?

Thursday, from Al Jazeera: “Yemen ‘on Brink of New Cholera Epidemic,’ Charity Warns.” The piece details how recent developments in the Yemeni civil war — specifically, the possible siege of the port city of Hodeidah — may cause a surge in cholera cases. There were over a million reported cases of cholera between the fall of 2016 and spring of 2018, the largest documented outbreak in modern times. The rate of infection had slowed, but observers now fear resurgence. Since the conflict began, medical services have been devastated across the war-torn country, and children in particular have been affected, with...

A public university is paying a radical 89-year-old linguist hundreds of thousands of dollars to teach his famously leftist brand of politics, according to records obtained by Judicial after a months-long battle with the taxpayer-funded institution. Judicial Watch launched an investigation after the University of Arizona (UA), located in Tucson with an enrollment of about 40,000, announced that it hired Noam Chomsky to teach a general education course for undergraduates titled “What is Politics?” In the announcement UA describes Chomsky as a “world-renowned linguist” and one of the “most cited scholars in modern history.” The reality is that Chomsky is...

Andrew Sullivan says the man who heckled Rummy was Not some crazed lefty. The man who demanded that Rumsfeld answer the questions we all want to have answered turns out to be the man who gave former president George H. W. Bush his daily intelligence briefing. And he was right in the exchange; and Rummy was factually wrong. Yep: Rumsfeld lied. Quelle surprise. No not some crazed lefty. The man was Ray McGovern, who Sweetness and Light noticed was part of Daniel Ellsberg's Truth Telling Project. Here's the relevant blog entry from the Belmont archives: Sweetness and Light has...

The left-wing "Antifa" movement is rising in prominence after clashing with white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., but one progressive scholar says the anti-fascists feed the fire they seek to extinguish. "As for Antifa, it's a minuscule fringe of the Left, just as its predecessors were," Noam Chomsky told the Washington Examiner. "It's a major gift to the Right, including the militant Right, who are exuberant." Many activists affiliated with the loosely organized Antifa movement consider themselves anarchists or socialists. They often wear black and take measures to conceal their identity.

Left-wing academic Noam Chomsky has declared that the Republican Party is the “most dangerous organization in human history” for their stance on climate change. Chomsky, still considered to be a darling of the left, told the BBC that, unlike ISIS or North Korea, the Republican Party is “dedicated to destroying the prospects for organized human existence.” Asked whether Donald Trump would damage America, Chomsky argued that the “main damage he will do is to the world, and it’s already happening.” “The most significant aspect of the Trump election, and it’s not just Trump, it’s the whole Republican party, is their...

...AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about this comment that you made that the Republican Party, you said, is the most dangerous organization in world history. Can you explain? NOAM CHOMSKY: I also said that it’s an extremely outrageous statement. But the question is whether it’s true. I mean, has there ever been an organization in human history that is dedicated, with such commitment, to the destruction of organized human life on Earth? Not that I’m aware of. Is the Republican organization—I hesitate to call it a party—committed to that? Overwhelmingly. There isn’t even any question about it...

This is an audio excerpt from the book, "Seven Miracles That Saved America: Why They Matter and Why We Should Have Hope" (http://tinyurl.com/j2x2pym) detailing some of Chomsky's anti-American views. An audio snippet of Howard Zinn can also be found here: https://youtu.be/u1f0rllGZdU

On Nov. 8, Donald Trump managed to pull the biggest upset in U.S. politics by tapping successfully into the anger of white voters and appealing to the lowest inclinations of people in a manner that would have probably impressed Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels himself. But what exactly does Trump's victory mean and what can one expect from this megalomaniac when he takes over the reins of power on Jan. 20, 2017? What is Trump's political ideology, if any and is "Trumpism" a movement? Will U.S. foreign policy be any different under a Trump administration? Some years ago, public intellectual Noam...